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AI’s Bias Bounty Will Help Find Unfair Algorithms Faster
what happened: While AI systems are being deployed all the time, it can take months or even years to figure out if and how they are biased. Today, a group of artificial intelligence and machine learning experts is launching a new bias bounty competition, which they hope will speed up the process of uncovering embedded bias.
What’s the situation in the first place? Taking inspiration from bug bounties in cybersecurity, the first bias bounty competition will focus on biased image detection. The winner will receive a $6,000 prize promised by Microsoft and startup Robust Intelligence, which has been hailed as a powerful force in the machine learning community to eradicate bias. Read the full article.
—Melissa Hekira
Should we believe—or even want—immortality?
Twenty years have passed since author Jonathan Weiner first met Methuselah-bearded Aubrey de Grey. At that time, Aubrey was already a devoted believer in the pursuit of eternal life. But he wasn’t famous or notorious; he wasn’t Aubrey! , because he will soon become a fan of the anti-aging crowd. He wasn’t a shameful person yet.
Weiner first met Aubrey in 2002, when Aubrey was still working as a computer programmer in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK. He quickly became a secular guru, an immortal prophet — much to the chagrin of most scientists in the field of aging. But Aubrey’s desire to convince believers that, if they’re lucky, they can live for centuries, millennia or more, raises a related question of what it is to want something we might not even believe. Read the full article.
This post is from our upcoming death-themed issue on October 26th. If you want to read it when it’s published, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for just $80 a year.